The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

Kroetsch's Gone Indian (1973) and Janet Frame's The Carpathians (1988).
The Kroetsch novel has an explicit Columbus intertext. Its protagonist,
Jeremy Sadness, is an American graduate student from Manhattan sent by
his supervisor, Mark Madham, on a journey to fulfill his "deep American
need to seek out the frontier" (5). Jeremy's thesis, which he is perpetually
unable to begin, let alone finish, has, as one of its false starts, the following
first sentence: "Christopher Columbus, not knowing that he had not come
to the Indies, named the inhabitants of that new world—" (21). And there it
ends — or doesn't. One of the titles he tries out is "The Columbus Quest:
The Dream, the Journey, the Surprise" (62). Like Columbus, Jeremy has a
dream — of the frontier of his imagination, and of himself as Grey Owl —
he makes a journey — to the small Alberta town of Notikeewin — and is
surprised — repeatedly. His quest is deconstructed in the surreal, carnivalesque
world of the prairies during a winter festival, a world where social
roles are exchanged and identities become so blurred that Jeremy can be
unnamed — stripped of his previous identity — and renamed into a multiplicity
of new identities that include buffalo, Roger Dorck the Winter King,
and Indian. He can dream the dreams of a mute aboriginal woman. He can
subvert his original mission, to attend a job interview arranged by his
supervisor, simply by failing to show up for his appointment. Like Isabella
and Ferdinand back in Spain, Madham is unable to control the activities of
his agent-explorer. Or is he? Just as Columbus's voyage was framed by the
imperial project of which it was a part, Jeremy's adventures as narrative are
framed and ultimately controlled by Madham, who, from his fixed position
in Binghamton, New York, is the stationary centre of power over this text.
To Madham at the time of framing, as to us, Jeremy exists only as text, as
narrative. Mâdham transcribes, edits and critiques the tapes on which
Jeremy reports his experiences. As motivating cause of Jeremy's journey, and
as intrusive framing narrator, Madham retains control over his apparently
out-of-control agent by reconstituting Jeremy's actions as a U.S.-based narrative.
In this late twentieth-century recasting of the Columbus quest, the
neo-imperial centre of power has become what 500 years ago was the object
of discovery: America.
The inclusion of a U.S.-based framing narrator is just one of many
intriguing correspondences between Gone Indian and The Carpathians.
Both novels follow the travels of a "child of Manhattan" (Gone Indian, 5) to
a fictional town in, respectively, Alberta and New Zealand's North Island.